A bitter, gloomy, carping, defensive, unoriginal, vain, self-absorbed, arrogant, jealous, depressive, demanding, priggish, self-righteous man, who was generally unwilling to lead those who wished to follow him, who was cruel and exploitative towards his father, cold and distant towards his children, and often dismissive and patronizing towards his disciples, Asher Ginzberg, or Ahad Ha'am (One of the People), the pen-name by which he was generally known, never even began the masterpiece he planned to write. He did not seem destined for greatness.

He failed to recognize any value in Theodor Herzl's contributions to Zionism, was blind to the potential of the kibbutz, and sensed none of the power of Yiddish or Jewish folklore for the east European Jewish masses. He tended to disdain those masses and to fear democracy; his own followers frequently ignored his teachings. He vastly underestimated the import of the Balfour Declaration. Indeed, who would have guessed he was destined for Zionist canonization?

All of these character flaws and misperceptions notwithstanding, Ahad Ha'am was enshrined in the Zionist pantheon early in his career, and he has remained secure there since his death in 1926. This unlikely apotheosis is the subject of Professor Zipperstein's masterly work.

Unlike most earlier books about Ahad Ha'am, this is not a hagiography. It is also not an intellectual biography; the sources of Ahad Ha'am's ideas, the author asserts, are too readily recognized by anyone conversant with nineteenth-century European thought to make such an exercise worth while. Nor, for that matter, is Zipperstein concerned with his subject's personal life, although some of the book's most convincing passages describe the Ginzberg family and the relationships of ‘the elusive prophet’ to his acolytes. In large measure explication de texte, the book examines Ahad Ha'am's writings in the context of his public life.

The personification of truth in the Jewish world (p. 242), Ahad Ha'am was a mythologizer of himself. He was a writer who saw (or at least depicted) his life's work as neatly constructed and all of a piece, with a beginning, a climax, and a conclusion, as if written beforehand by a skilful novelist.